Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture

Professor Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State University has an online opinion piece at US News and World Report. The topic? A response and rebuttal of various slurs against Pennock made in that venue by Discovery Institute spokesperson Casey Luskin, plus some very pertinent remarks about the unseemly and violent rhetoric being deployed by the religious antievolution movement.

The following essay was written in response to a Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture critique of the PBS Evolution series back around 2000. The DI somehow thought that number of Nobel prizes awarded to any citizen, native or naturalized, in the USA speaks as an endorsement of K-12 education available in the post-Scopes trial period. Various erroneous claims of the DI are punctured.

In 1999, the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture put together a brief fund-raising document outlining their purpose and plans in general terms for the following twenty years. They used a third-party copying center for duplication, and the person who was actually tasked with copying the document thought it looked of interest, and with a friend released the text to the Internet.

I have hosted the OCR of the text here, complete with original OCR errors, since that time. I'm pleased to be able to offer a PDF version now.

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Antievolutionists Say the Darndest Things

Antievolutionists often express outrage over alleged incivility from those who oppose their efforts to evade the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But they have no difficulty in dishing out the abuse themselves. Here is a sample from the Invidious Comparisons thread that documents egregious behavior on the part of the religious antievolution advocates.

IDC advocate Mark Hartwig:

The intimidation tactics, however, signal something important about Darwinists. That "something" was explained in an insightful little piece by one A.J. Obrdlik. Published in 1942, it was a study of "gallows humor" in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation. In that article, Obrdlik made a very keen observation:

Gallows humor is a reliable index of the morale of the oppressed whereas the reaction to it on the part of the oppressors tells a long story about the actual strength of the dictators: If they can afford to ignore it, they are strong; if they react wildly with anger, striking their victims with severe reprisals and punishment, they are not sure of themselves, no matter how much they display their might on the surface.

With the growing success of the Wedge, I'm sure we're going to see a lot more of this stuff. But Darwinist tactics will become a lot less intimidating as people realize that they signify not strength but panic.